Oracle recently announced a proposal to move the open source Hudson project to the Eclipse Foundation, and the foundation has accepted pending a 30-day compliance review. Should your stance on Jenkins or Hudson change as a result? The short answer: no. The more interesting question is what this contribution means for the Eclipse Foundation.

I can't speak for the Jenkins folks, but one of the good things about Hudson moving to Eclipse is that anyone can participate. When the fork happened, I think it came down to a difference of opinion about how to run an open source project. Oracle and Sonatype wanted more of an enterprise focus, and CloudBees wanted more of a grass-roots environment, which is how Hudson came to be. I think both are valid opinions.

So when we started talking about this move to Eclipse, we initially focused on talking to people whose views were more in line with our enterprise focus. Now that the proposal is public, we welcome anyone to join the conversation over the next two months while we finalize the submission and get it accepted.

Farrell makes a couple points that appear counter to the public record:

Unlike Oracle, CloudBees relies on Jenkins to power a commercial product aimed at enterprises. To claim that CloudBees has anything less than an "enterprise focus" is, well, curious.

The Jenkins organization on GitHub now has almost 500 repositories, the majority of those plug-ins, and almost 100 public members, while Hudson only has its core repository available and only four public members. Of the 25 most commonly installed plug-ins from before the split, 21 of them have moved primary development to focus on Jenkins, with the remaining four not having any changes during that time. In fact, 40 new plug-ins have been added to Jenkins since the split, while only one has been added to Hudson. The development community has definitely made its choice heard.

The lack of community response on the Hudson proposal's mailing list at Eclipse is not a very good start for the project. Two individuals that have commented suggest they support the proposal if it will bring together the Hudson and Jenkins camps. However, there' no indication of a Hudson and Jenkins unification occurring as a result of the Eclipse contribution proposal.